ram mahalingham

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IV. Critical Intersectional Awareness and Resilience

Intersectionality is an emerging area of research where intersectional theorists have argued that instead of focusing on social identities along categories, such as race, gender, ethnicity, social class and sexuality, we need to consider how these categories simultaneously affect our lives. Most of the research on intersectionality so far focused on explicating the multiplicative risks and stressors in embodying intersectional identities. I have conducted how embodying multiple marginalized identities affect the psychological well-being of Asian Americans, I also study whether higher levels of intersectional awareness is indeed a source of resilience which enables us to feel connected to people with different social identities. My research addresses this gap in the literature. More specifically, I study how intersectional awareness is a source of strength because it will help people to feel connected to outgroup members. There were no measures of intersectionality that measure intersectional awareness of multiple identities and privilege awareness. We developed a new measure, called Critical Intersectional Awareness (CIA, Mahalingam, Sanders & Yim, 2010). The CIA scale measures beliefs about multiple identities and privileges associated with those identities and attitudes toward coalition building with outgroup members. Using the scale, my students and I have conducted a series of studies. We found that critical intersectional awareness is a source of resilience and is positively related to various measures of resilience, such as John Henryism, identity integration, perspective taking and self esteem.

Intersectionality Board Game

In collaboration with Dr. Jennifer Yim, my former doctoral student who has developed an Intersectionality board game to teach intersectionality. We are currently examining the usefulness of intersectionality board game for conducting research on intersectionality, resilience and intergroup processes.